Quantum Forest logs are written by Luis A. Apiolaza in Christchurch, New Zealand.
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Most of the time I work with small files, mostly text, even if they have a fair amount of equations. Equations are not a big deal, particularly if I am using LaTeX (with TeXShop in the mac or MikTeX in PCs). Nevertheless, some times I have to deliver presentations or—in this particular case—receive someone else’s presentation for my classes.
If I am producing teaching material I use Keynote, which is a sucker for file size (my main pet hate with it), but it looks great. I can go for Keynote because I am using my Macbook Pro. If I am giving a presentation to industry I normally have to put my presentation in to someone else’s computer, so I go for PowerPoint (and do not use any compressed images), to avoid errors.
Anyway, this time I was supposed to receive a PowerPoint file from a guest lecturer, so I could print copies of the presentation for the students. The problem was that the presentation was 16MB (not big for these days, mostly pictures), and the university has an attachment limit of 6MB. Google mail has a limit of 10MB and I wanted to avoid taking time for the guest lecturer partitioning his presentation in to 5MB chunks.
I tried using Mediamax, which allows anonymous uploads to registered users. It did not work that well, because the files would take several hours to show up in my Mediamax file manager. Then we tried with a much simpler solution: Mailbigfile. This worked flawlessly, I immediately received an email with a web address from where to download the files and the interface was quite clean. There were only a few text ads to support the service. Simple, reliable and free: what else do I need? In some cases encryption could be a concern, but they do offer a ‘pro’ encrypted version for USD18 a year. That aside, I do not need hosting big files in a permanent basis, so Mailbigfile has spot on features for me.
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